The Other Side of Venice's Overtourism Problem

Last month, Venice’s city council came up with its most draconian measures to address overtourism yet: Excessive noise at siesta time, sketching on the street without a permit, possessing a bike, and even sitting in unauthorized locations can now all result in a fine of up to €500 ($570). The wrist-slapping measures are in addition to wider plans, including a forthcoming ban on cruise ships over 60,000 tons from sailing along the Giudeca canal, and bans on drivers who hit the Ponte della Libertà bridge without pre-booking parking at its end. "The message we have to get through is that we're not joking," said Paola Mar, the local official in charge of tourism.

But Mar’s scolding might be working a little too well, says Alastair Thomann, CEO of Generator, the poshtel chain with an outpost just across the water from St. Mark’s Square, on the island of Giudecca. “This market [usually] performs with brutally high occupancies year round,” he says. “But now we’re feeling the pinch. It’s the kind of stuff we see after a big financial crisis, or the Iraq war.”

Thomann notes that Generator’s occupancy is down 6.9 percent compared to the same time last year, and the rates for the full year are down 9.2 percent. Taken together, this translates into a staggering 15.5 percent drop in RevPAR (or revenue per available room), the industry standard benchmark for a hotel’s financial success. The softening hasn’t come in off-months, either, but during Venice’s high season from April-July. “I’ve just come off the phone with our GM there, and this is what people are discussing every day,” he says. “The guest comes in and talks about ‘Am I really welcome here [in Venice]? How do they perceive me?’” He notes that millennials, who form by far the largest group of Generator’s guests, are particularly sensitive to the situation—which translates, of course, into hesitation over booking.

Generator's occupancy is down 6.9 percent over this same time last year.

Courtesy Generator Venice

Generator’s data isn’t an outlier: Sangeeta Sadarangani of family travel firm Crossing took almost a third fewer clients to the city in summer 2018 compared to the previous year, and says that overtourism was a major contributing factor. EF’s Go Ahead Tours, another millennial-skewing operation, saw a shift, too: there was a 15 percent uptick year on year on travelers visiting outside peak season (October-May) rather than the conventional window. That said, not all operators are noticing a ding to their business. “We haven’t seen evidence of it impacting group tour demand this year,” says Jay Wiley, CMO of smarTours. In fact, bookings for 2018 are up and remain strong for 2019, too, according to Wiley.

Still, anecdotes and data like Generator's suggest Venice’s anti-overtourism moves have instead been interpreted as anti-tourism of any kind; rather than encouraging better, more thoughtful behavior, the council’s moves are scaring many tourists away. That’s a major risk for a city where 11.6 percent of its GDP, and 12.7 percent of its jobs, derive directly from this single sector, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. Of course, it’s easy to ascribe this drop-off solely to the attitude of local tourism chiefs, but Europe's ferocious heat wave in summer 2018 was likely a factor, as is the extensive media coverage of overtourism in cities like Venice and Barcelona, which travelers have reported, anecdotally, to the hotels and operators.

Elizabeth Becker was one of the first to identify the looming problem of overtourism in her 2013 book, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel & Tourism. She notes that slumping numbers are likely also the result of the change in the city’s overall make-up. Venice’s population in 1951, just before mass market travel exploded across Europe, sat at 174,000; by 2009, it had slumped so far—to just under 60,000—that some even staged a mock funeral for the city; the latest figures, from 2016, show an additional decline of just under 10 percent. It puts the ratio of tourists to locals, per year, at a staggering 140:1.

“Locals were literally pushed out, and when the locals left, so did the life and culture of Venice," she says. "It has been hollowed out. So, who wants to stay in a luxury hotel in a city that’s extremely crowded with other tourists and locals who resent you?”